Sometimes it can feel like Melbourne isn’t really a place for people with ambition. It’s cold, insular and rewards people for resting on their laurels.

Allday – Adelaide-born MC Tom Gaynor – is ambitious, too ambitious for Melbourne. So he moved. “I just didn’t have any goals in Australia,” the 26-year-old explains, “I was like, ‘What’s the point in this anymore?’”

Gaynor hasn’t been living in Los Angeles for long, and he’s making the commute back home fairly often (“I’m lonely, but I’m going to be back there next month!”), but from the way he talks you get the feeling that relocating to the US is no short-term thing. “Coming to America I’m hitting this thing where I wanna be bigger,” he admits. “I’d really like to be spoken of in the same breath as people I really love. I want people to go ‘That Frank Ocean song, that Post Malone song, that Allday song.’”

It’s a heady dream, and a hard one to attain. Then again, Gaynor has a knack for exceeding expectations — in 2014, Allday was playing Melbourne’s Ding Dong Lounge, a 300 capacity dive. Barely three years on, he’s preparing for a series of shows that will see him play to nearly 14,000 fans across four cities, including a stop at Melbourne’s five thousand capacity Festival Hall.

For many, this could be a peak, the culmination of years of work. For Gaynor, not so much. He describes this part of his career — not cockily, not arrogantly, just matter-of-factly — as a “middle period”.

“It changes the fabric of your personality”

LA has done Gaynor good. The move is part of his rebuilding process after a period of unhealthy partying around the release of his debut, 2014’s Startup Cult, left him emotionally wrecked and uninterested in making music. In LA, he’s got space to breathe – the freedom to just be Tom. “I’ve just sorta been hanging out and trying to be a bit normal, have a bit of a normal rhythm.”

Speeding, Gaynor’s second album, deals with the fallout from the tumultuous period post-Startup Cult, when a perfect storm of sudden fame and taxing touring pushed the MC off course.

“Music became not very important to me at all. Touring was just a thing I did that facilitated my partying”

“[Drug use] affects everything in your life,” he admits, his words slow and deliberate. “It changes the fabric of your personality… Music became not very important to me at all. Touring was just a thing I did that facilitated my partying.”

While Gaynor stresses the fact that the events he writes about on Speeding aren’t all necessarily true (“I just wanted to keep it vague”) he also concedes that he and his art are inseparable; the line between Tom Gaynor and Allday is nonexistent, for better or for worse.

“I can feel the times where I know I could put on a persona or do a certain thing that would be more marketable or more palatable or more outrageous,” he says, “but in the end I don’t feel hungry enough to win an ARIA that I would just fucking [change] myself.”

“I just hit a time when I was sick of being criticised all the time”

This lack of separation between Gaynor’s public and private life is one of the many things that’s garnered him so many adoring fans.

As with the best stars, Gaynor’s social media presence is perfectly curated to give the illusion of unfettered access. At this point in his career, Gaynor knows how to pull back without seeming too private, but when he first started out it was his “bright-eyed, small town guy” innocence and willingness to share that drew in a crowd.

“It was just too much to go on the internet and have someone call me a fucking dickhead or whatever when I was really depressed”

“I used to post on Instagram all the time, I used to be so open. That was part of what attracted people to me and part of why people hated me,” he reflects, “I was just innocently projecting my life into public.”

Online hate ate away at Gaynor’s enjoyment of social media. “I just hit a time when I was sick of being criticised all the time,” he explains. “I think that kind of coincided with doing a lot of drugs, and it was just too much to go on the internet and have someone call me a fucking dickhead or whatever when I was really depressed.”

It’s taken time, but a few changes — regular exercise, meditation, going vegan, being nicer to people, and, of course, “not doing drugs all the time” — have made Gaynor a happier person, and a person gradually becoming more comfortable with sharing with his fans.

“I never was really accepted by the Australian hip-hop scene”

Speeding isn’t by any means a difficult listen, but it’s not a pop record like Startup Cult was.

Gaynor says that in contrast to his debut, Speeding isn’t “a Kanye or Drake copycat album,” but, ironically, it’s the closest to Drake that he’s ever been: in moving away from direct imitation, he’s tapped into the kind of deeply confessional lyrics that make Drake so compelling. Despite this passing resemblance to Drizzy, Gaynor isn’t quite part of any North American hip-hop scene yet; he’s barely part of the Australian hip-hop scene.

“I never was really accepted by the Australian hip-hop scene, and I never really wanted to be,” he says. “I like being out on my own.”

Which doesn’t mean he has no friends — Speeding features five collaborations, including two songs with nascent Brisbane MC Grace Shaw, better known as Mallrat. Shaw is an ideal foil for Gaynor, gliding into Speeding as if it were her own album, the light in her voice pushing back against the shade that tints the record. Aside from sharing a manager, Shaw and Gaynor also spend most of their time together, so collaboration was always “super obvious.”

The record’s other significant collaboration is ‘In Motion’, produced by Melbourne musician Gab Strum, AKA Japanese Wallpaper. It’s Gaynor’s best song by a mile: never quite hitting like a rap song or soaring like a pop song, it floats and undulates, encapsulating Speeding’s latent darkness while also tapping into a sweetness and sense of nostalgia that feels specific to the song.

There’s something miraculous about the song that Gaynor could identify as soon as he heard Strum’s first demo. “Gab [is] just so perceptive,” says Gaynor admiringly, “He had his music part and as soon as he played it I was like ‘Oh shit, that’s it.’” While he never names names, many of the songs on Speeding address real people — friends, family, romantic partners.

Regardless, Gaynor isn’t worried about what they’ll think: “I don’t tell lies in my songs, so if you don’t like how you’re portrayed, you don’t like how you’ve acted in reality. That’s really your problem.”

Allday’s new album Speeding is out April 21 on ONETWO.

Shaad D’Souza is a freelance writer from Melbourne. Follow him on Twitter here.